Ngaio Marsh, 1895–1982

Abstract

Dame Ngaio Marsh, the detective novelist, dramatist, short-story writer, theatre producer, non-fiction writer, scriptwriter, autobiographer, painter and critic was born in Christchurch, New Zealand on 23 April 1895. Her birth in the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign and her childhood and adolescence in the twilight—albeit a transferred one—of the Edwardian era were to prove crucial in shaping the prevailing temper and tone of her outlook, particularly when Marsh set out to experiment with writing as a young woman. Her very name enacts a symbolic and liminal binary opposition between Old and New World elements: a confluence echoing the indigenous (the ngaio being a native New Zealand coastal tree) and the imported (a family surname from the coastal marshes of Kent, England). Seen thus, ‘Ngaio’ connotes New World zest—a freshness of outlook, insight and titanic energy—while ‘Marsh’ suggests an Old World gravitas grounded in notions of a stable, class-based lineage and secure traditions. The tension between these twin imperatives and hemispheres drove and energized Marsh’s career and life-pattern (of ongoing dualities: New Zealand-England; writing-production) and enabled her to live what Howard McNaughton has called an incognito/’alibi career’ in a pre-jet age of sailing boats and vast distances and time horizons between her competing homelands (in Lidgard and Acheson, pp.94-100). Edith Ngaio Marsh’s Taurian date of birth was both richly symbolic and portentous, given that 23 April is both St George’s Day and the legendary birthdate of Marsh’s beloved Bard, Shakespeare. The other, antipodean, aspect of her dual heritage (father a Londoner, mother New Zealand-born of English stock) is encoded in what became quite early on her preferred first name. Her parents asked an uncle, a lay missionary fluent in the Maori language to choose a suitable indigenous name for their first-born (as was common practice at the time), and he selected ‘Ngaio’ (pronounced ‘nye-o’) which denotes a native evergreen tree but may also connote ‘expert,’ ‘clever,’ ‘deliberate,’ ‘thorough’ or ‘restless’ (all applicable to Marsh). As an adult, Marsh cut an imposing, dignified and—sometimes—an intimidating, Amazonian figure. Jack Henderson, an early student actor (who played her first Prince Hamlet in 1943) later described Ngaio as ‘tall (5 foot 10 inches), thin, mannish in appearance, flat-chested, rather gawky,’ adding that she dressed ‘usually in beautifully cut slacks’ and possessed ‘large feet with shoes like canal boats’ and had a deep contralto voice yet was ‘intensely feminine